Vote Protest Heats Up in South Africa : Tutu Detained, Students Fired on as Elections Near

Riot police fired shotguns and tear gas at demonstrating college students in Durban, arrested and briefly detained Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and other leading anti-apartheid clergymen in Cape Town and halted a march on Johannesburg’s City Hall on Monday. The increasingly heated clashes with defiant blacks came only two days before nationwide elections that exclude the black majority.

While his government was cracking down on dissenters, acting President Frederik W. de Klerk told a political meeting in Johannesburg that “discrimination must be eliminated” and pledged his ruling National Party to “a new South Africa which will be just and strong.”

Difficult Challenge

It was De Klerk’s final campaign speech before Wednesday’s parliamentary elections, which are considered one of his party’s most difficult challenges in nearly half a century of rule.

The election has been all but overshadowed, however, by a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, which has gathered momentum and world attention since it began Aug. 2. Police have arrested 1,600 activists, detained 240 others without charge, banned 14 meetings and broken up at least 46 political gatherings in the past month, according to the independent Human Rights Commission, which issued a report on the defiance campaign Monday.

As part of the defiance action, major anti-apartheid groups and the country’s two largest black labor federations have called for a two-day general strike beginning today, and hundreds of thousands of black workers and students are expected to join the work stoppage.

Follows Rally Ban

The arrest Monday of Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, followed the banning of a “free and fair elections” rally at the City Hall in downtown Cape Town, where police and demonstrators have clashed several times in recent days. Police have sweeping powers to ban political gatherings under the country’s three-year-old state of emergency.

The rally was rescheduled for a nearby Methodist church, and at least 100 officers in riot gear blocked the church doors with armored trucks and turned activists away.

Tutu, the Rev. Beyers Naude, a white anti-apartheid campaigner, and the Rev. Allan Boesak, mixed-race president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, were among 11 leaders who arrived at the church and “made it clear they objected to a police vehicle blocking a church in a Christian country,” according to Tutu’s press aide, John Allen.

Concerned that people were trapped inside the church, the clergymen refused to leave and were arrested. They were taken to the police station, held in jail cells and released 90 minutes later. It was the second arrest in less than a week for Tutu and Boesak, who have been prominent in the defiance campaign.

“They have gone berserk,” Tutu said after being released. “They are clearly no longer in charge, and they are aware of it. I want to say to the world that the terrorists in South Africa are the South African government.”

In Durban, several thousand students at the multiracial University of Natal defied a police ban on an anti-election rally. Police arrested 13 people after firing on the crowd with tear gas and bullets, unidentified witnesses told news agencies. About 10 people were injured in the melee.

At the nearby University of Durban-Westville, police broke up a group of 500 demonstrators using batons and tear gas and arrested 11.

Shortly before De Klerk’s speech to National Party supporters at City Hall in Johannesburg, about 125 blacks carrying placards attempted to march to the building and present a letter to De Klerk, “detailing our views about the elections and the system of apartheid in this country,” said Cyril Ramaphosa, general secretary of the nation’s largest union, the National Union of Mineworkers.

Ordered by police to disperse, the marchers refused and sat down on the pavement. After a 15-minute standoff, a police officer accepted the group’s letter and the crowd left.

The government believes the defiance campaign is aimed at triggering violence and disrupting the elections.

“We are prepared to come down mercilessly and hard on anyone who wishes to disrupt the elections,” Brig. Leon Mellet, a police spokesman, said. Polling stations already are under guard, he added.

University Closes

The University of Cape Town, a multiracial institution that has been the frequent site of anti-apartheid protests, announced Monday that it is closing its doors today and Wednesday.

“For the university to adopt an attitude of business as usual in the context of the tensions surrounding the elections and the denial of fundamental freedoms . . . would be neither principled nor possible,” Vice Chancellor Stuart Saunders said.

The extent of the government’s attempt to crush the defiance campaign was outlined Monday in a special report by the Johannesburg-based Human Rights Commission.

“As the election nears, the government has responded with the full thrust of its brutality and repressive machinery” to win votes, the commission said in its report, “Days of Defiance.”

In recent weeks, defiance campaigners have attempted to highlight apartheid laws and severe restrictions on political expression by staging protests at whites-only schools, beaches and bus stops and by attempting to hold peaceful demonstrations in city centers.

Some of the protests, such as a march by 5,000 people on whites-only beaches in Durban on Sunday, have been largely peaceful. But others, including an attempt by 1,000 people to march in Cape Town on Saturday, have been broken up by police with tear gas and water cannons in violent confrontations that have left dozens injured.